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WORLD BUSINESS

Company Profile: 3i

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(CNN) -- 3i is one of the world's leading venture capital and private equity firms with offices and business interests in Europe, the U.S., China and South-East Asia.

The UK-based company ("Investors in Industry") was created in 1945 by a syndicate of British banks with just £10 million ($19.6 million) to invest.

Nowadays the 3i Group, which became a plc in 1987 and floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1994, invests around $2.6 billion every year, managing assets worth more than $13 billion. It is the only FTSE 100 company in its sector.

In the last five years, 3i has backed the launch of more than 40 companies onto the world's leading exchanges and executed some 450 mergers and executions, recovering strongly from the burst of the dotcom bubble which saw its assets halved in four years.

Since then 3i has reduced its portfolio from some 5,000 companies to around 1,000 while venture capital -- much of which had been in technology -- now accounts for just 20 percent of its businesses.

In May 2006 3i announced it was returning $1.4 billion to shareholders after selling a record $4.3bn of investments.

Almost 60 percent of deals are now generated overseas, compared with just a quarter in 2001, focusing in the sectors of communications, health, software, electronics, semi-conductors, and petroleum.

Recent deals have included a $25 million investment in China's "Little Sheep" Mongolian restaurant chain; $22 million in the Mumbai-based digital cinema chain UFO Moviez; and the acquisition of the British-based Chorion intellectual property group, which owns the rights to a portfolio that includes Mr Men, Noddy and the works of Agatha Christie.


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